Mema's House, Mexico City
On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
Mema’s house is in the poor barrio Nezahualcoyotl, a crowded urban space on the outskirts of Mexico City where people survive with the help of family, neighbors, and friends. This house is a sanctuary for a group of young, homosexual men who meet to do what they can’t do openly at home. They chat, flirt, listen to music, and smoke marijuana. Among the group are sex workers and transvestites with high heels, short skirts, heavy make-up, and voluminous hairstyles; and their partners, young, bisexual men, wearing T-shirts and worn jeans, short hair, and maybe a mustache.
Mema, an AIDS educator and the leader of this gang of homosexual men, invited Annick Prieur, a European sociologist, to meet the community and to conduct her fieldwork at his house. Prieur lived there for six months between 1988 and 1991, and she has kept in touch for more than eight years. As Prieur follows the transvestites in their daily activities—at their work as prostitutes or as hairdressers, at night having fun in the streets and in discos—on visits with their families and even in prisons, a fascinating story unfolds of love, violence, and deceit.
She analyzes the complicated relations between the effeminate homosexuals, most of them transvestites, and their partners, the masculine-looking bisexual men, ultimately asking why these particular gender constructions exist in the Mexican working classes and how they can be so widespread in a male-dominated society—the very society from which the term machismo stems. Expertly weaving empirical research with theory, Prieur presents new analytical angles on several concepts: family, class, domination, the role of the body, and the production of differences among men.
A riveting account of heroes and moral dilemmas, community gossip and intrigue, Mema’s House, Mexico’s City offers a rich story of a hitherto unfamiliar culture and lifestyle.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mema opened his small house in Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, a former squatter community on the outskirts of Mexico City, to the surprisingly large number of young effeminate men in the area and to Norwegian sociologist Prieur, whom he had met at an AIDS conference. Prieur spent six months, on and off, literally sharing a bed with Mema while his other guests slept on the floor. Her aim was to find out why these men live their lives "as feminine men in a society where masculinity really counts, where it is of the utmost social importance." Much of what Prieur finds out is pretty grim: Many of these men earn their livings as prostitutes, while the families who live off their earnings despise them. People in the neighborhood enjoy their banter but would not help if one of the vestidas were attacked. They steal, take drugs and are the perpetrators and victims of frequent violence. Prieur gets so wrapped up in this world that she comes to understand how "selling sex could be a way to gain independence, taking drugs a way to get some entertainment, stealing a way to win self-respect, that violence is just the order of things and that sexual experience is the meaning of life." Prieur limited her time with Mema to short stays, and the rest of the book is a study of Mexican gender roles and where these men fit in. This is a sociological study, but the people in it are both so poignant and infuriating that they make Mema's House a fascinating read. 15 halftone photos not seen by PW.
